“I won’t be long,” she told him. “There’ll be a breeze on the hill above the Seine.”
In the beating, aggressive sun, she closed her eyes. Her family of three, because they didn’t fit in, anywhere, was isolated and close. At first, she thought this was the way every family was, and her childhood was a paradise of innocence. On summer holidays they would drive along the coast almost to Tunisia, doubling back on the road west from the village of Chataibi to a deserted beach south of the Cap de Fer. Several kilometers long, it went even more kilometers deep inland over dunes of the purest, whitest sand. There were only a few farmhouses just north of it. The Belkacems would camp for a week or ten days in August, carrying in many trips across the sand to their tent the food and water they brought with them. But the main course was always fish her father caught while casting from the beach. Year after year, they never saw another person, and were free there: free of allegiance, free of fear, free to love as if throughout the world Christians married Muslims and Muslims married Christians and no one thought twice about it.
Eventually the war drove them out and to Paris. Now, in Saint-Germainen-Laye, Amina felt the heat almost like the driving heat of North Africa. Eyes closed, she saw the sea surging in dark blue. She could see into the distance and along the bleached strand undulating in rising heat and disappearing in a confusion of vision before it reached the horizon, white glare over the blue, the colors of innocence and love. She had them still, as richly saturated in heat and light as when she had first seen them.
“DO YOU KNOW Jules Lacour?” Arnaud asked the guard at the pool.
“Why wouldn’t I? He’s been coming here since the beginning of time.”
“Is he here now?”
“No.”
“Was he here?”
“Yesterday he swam five kilometers. He says he’s going to swim to Peru. He’s a liar.”
After a pause to take this in, Arnaud asked, “Do you vote?”
“In elections?”
“That would be a good place to start.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, when there is an election, do you vote in it?”
“Of course I do.”
As they left the pool they both knew where they were going and didn’t need to speak. Nonetheless, Duvalier voiced what they were thinking. “If he runs in the forest, he’ll come out in the park, but maybe he just runs on the Terrace. If we don’t see him, we’ll wait in front of the house.”
“In this heat?”
“We can park in the shade.”
FROM THE POOL, Arnaud, Duvalier, and from centre-ville, Amina, came onto the Allée Louis XIV, Amina a hundred meters or so behind the two policemen. A great formal garden gives a certain elevation to the soul if the paths and plantings are laid out according to proportions known since classical times and as inexplicable and ineffable in their effect as the measures of intervals and tones in music. All the more so if the garden is on a height overlooking a distant prospect of varied colors beneath a dome of clear sky. The two men and Amina walked slowly in the heat. A breeze crested over the hill, as Amina had thought it would, and continued evenly down the straight Allée.
Arnaud and Duvalier came to the bench where Jules had been sitting. Jules had gone into the park to find a spigot, where he would feel water for the last time, holding it in his cupped hands again and again and bringing it to his face. He knelt at the gray pipe, not caring that he wet his clothes as he brought double handfuls up to his face. The water was clear, cool, and pure, its sound beautiful even as it issued from a spigot to which gardeners, without thinking much about it, attached their hoses.
Arnaud and Duvalier straightened themselves so as to rise slightly higher in the hope of seeing a little farther down the glimmering white path disappearing northward along the Terrace as straight as a rule. They shielded their eyes almost in salute, and saw just an empty road. Independently, each felt that he had glimpsed something on the long white prospect that said Jules was gone, and that, somehow justly, he was out of their grasp.
When they turned to go back to their car and find a place to park in the shade, they were relieved. They looked forward to going home that evening and relaxing, they hoped, as if just after a graduation. If they had him or if, as they expected, he was gone, the case would either be closed or tabled, and they would be free until assigned to the next. They sensed that it was over.
As Arnaud and Duvalier left the park, Amina arrived at the bench on the circle between the Allée Henri IV and the Long Terrace. She was entirely alone, and hadn’t come in search of Jules. In fact, she had more or less given up. She looked toward Paris as the cooling breeze lifted her hair, ruffled her blouse, and made her skirt luff at her legs.
As Jules emerged from the lawn at the edge of which he had knelt at the spigot, he saw the trim form of a woman standing next to the bench. At first he appreciated her for the firmness of the way she stood and her colors in the sun. He kept walking slowly toward her. Then he recognized her, and stopped. Staring at her, it was as if everything in his life rose and burst within him. The contention of equally balanced forces was unlike anything he had ever experienced. The weight of loyalty, obligation, and faithful love fought against the promise of life and love anew.
If she walked away – when she walked away – what would he do? If she turned toward him to get to the RER, he would have no choice. If she went left toward the Long Terrace, where he had been just about to begin his last run, the plan would be shattered at least for that day. Or perhaps forever, because, although he didn’t know it, Arnaud and Duvalier were waiting for him.
As the breeze died down she was ready once again to start her search for a place to live. Without having seen him, she turned right, to the town, and went up the stairs at the southeast corner of the circle, rising toward the five great ornamental urns flanking the steps. The scene seemed to Jules like something on as unreasonably grand a scale as in a dream – that she would go, and he would let her go as she branched off from his life, closing his course, in such a monumental way. And yet her diminutiveness, her self-containment, and grace made even the grandeur of the exit close and warm. Had he been next to her, and touched her, it would have changed everything.